Forgive my tardiness. My mom is coming to visit for the Easter weekend and I put off all my cleaning until the last minute. I’ve been running around like a chicken with its head cut off for the last 3 hours dusting, vacuuming, Swiffering, mopping, doing dishes, bleaching,Windexing, burning candles, doing laundry, taking out garbage, and other such nonsense.

I pride myself on keeping a clean house, but there is nothing like an impending visit from your mom to help you see all the little things that need to be done.

My mom get’s here tomorrow at 2:55, but I have to be to work at 3 so she is going to meet me at my boss’ house and hangout with me there until I get off. I only work a couple of hours tomorrow, so hopefully we will get home early, make dinner, have some wine, and watch a movie or something. Friday we are going downtown, then Saturday I am taking her to Little Italy and the New York Botanical Garden for an orchid show, all here in the Bronx! I don’t know what we are doing Sunday yet. A friend invited me to go to church with her, but I will have to see what my mom wants to do.

Anyway…this week’s Write or Die Wednesday prompt asks what your biggest vice is or which of the seven deadly sins you commit most often?

I’m Catholic and part of being Catholic is examining one’s conscience on a regular basis, before going to confession or on a regular basis to keep one’s self in check!

Despite daily efforts to avoid doing sinful stuff, I could probably list twenty ways I commit each of these sins regularly. That being said, I definitly think I commit the sin of sloth most often!

I LOVE to sleep and watch movies, so that often leads to avoiding my responsibilities. I obviously work and maintain good grades, so it hasn’t necessarily impacted my life negatively, but it is definitely a severely bad habit that I possess. I can use almost anything to justify not leaving the house, even if I am initially really excited about doing something. My laziness means I don’t exercise the way I should, I don’t devote enough undivided attention to completeing assignments to the best of my ability (again, while still maintaining my grades), and I definitely don’t “take life by the horns” as much as I should. I am also spiritually lazy. I am Catholic, but I always seem to come up with excuses for not going to confession or praying the Rosary. I do pay attention to my faith and use it as a tool to become a better person, but sloth has contributed to not growing my faith to its full potential.

Netflix, sleep, foreign languages, and wine are definitely my biggest enablers. I so thoroughly enjoy each of those things that I would rather partake in them than pretty much anything. I also LOVE hiking, shopping, fishing, swimming in the ocean, and traveling, but since I am living on a budget and can’t really safely do the others alone, I stick to my ol’ sloth-making activities.

I’m sure anxiety and self esteem contribute to my laziness, since it is so much easier to avoid fear, confrontation, and other awkwardness when you just stay home.

Gluttony would probably be my next biggest sin. I am definitely a hedonist at heart and I have a difficult time with self-discipline when it comes to certain things (like movies, goat cheese, and wine, HAHA!).

One of the prayers that Catholic’s say at every Mass includes the line, “I have sinned in what I have done and what I have failed to do…” I remember the first time I heard this it kind of stunned me. I still think of sin as active choices we make to do bad stuff, but I never thought about the fact that you can also commit a sin by NOT doing something too. That’s still one of the big areas I have to work on, haha!

I’d say the sins I commit least often are wrath, pride, and envy.

I obviously get mad at people and sometimes want to smack them into next week, but I am not a vengeful, plotting, back stabbing type of person. I get my feelings hurt and take things personally more often than getting angry or wanting to get back at people. I’m also not a very prideful person. More often than not I assume that I did something to cause any negative events or behaviors and will often try to remedy the situation and apologize. I admire a LOT of people and often do feel like other people are leading really fun and carefree lives, so I do feel envy in certain senses, but never in the way that I want to take what someone else has or live their life. I am thoroughly convinced everyone has their own problems and they have developed ways to cope with them. I know if I had the chance to inhabit someone else’s life or they had the chance to inhabit mine, we would each be unequipped to deal with each other’s hardships.

Whether you are religious or not, we all do/think about doing crappy things everyday. I think as long as you are consistently working to make a positive contribution to the world (not matter what it is), correct your mistakes, and try to make others’ lives a little easier, then everything will all work out in the end. With this outlook you don’t even have to believe in/worry about heaven, hell, God, the devil, or sin (if you don’t want/need to) because the focus is on the now and doing the best you can in the present moment to make your life and the lives of those around you better. It’s a pretty awesome philosophy (check out A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle if you are interested)!

Hopefully I will post a blog on Saturday or Sunday with some pictures from Little Italy and the New York Botanical Garden. I hope everyone has a good Passover/Easter or just a great weekend in general!

As you can see I haven’t written in a month, but I have a good excuse: I found a job!

If you are looking for quick employment (in New York or otherwise), I highly suggest Care.com! It isn’t just babysitting. You can apply as a turtor, personal assistant, elder care specialist, or for babysitting! I was able to find a permanent position pretty close to where I live.

I’m also tutoring online, so if you or anyone you know needs help with school work (kindergarten through college), check out my site and schedule a virtual tutoring session!

Now that all that advertising is out of the way, I can get down to the nitty-gritty.

I have another recipe to share and some recommendations for a few places around NYC if you are planning on moving or visiting!

First and foremost, I want to tell you guys about Mother’s Bake Shop! The lady I work for took me there right after Yom Kippur to buy some Challah bread, but I went back by myself a week later and am now obsessed. This place has EVERYTHING.

If you watched the recent Anthony Bourdain: Part’s Unknown episode in the Bronx, he went to a deli in Spuyten Duyvil, Bronx…this bakery is right next door.

It’s a Jewish bakery, but they also sell all different kinds of European and American desserts. Cannolis, cheesecake, baklava, cupcakes, cookies, etc. and it’s extremely reasonable. I visited with a friend and we got a piece of cheesecake, a coffee, and a box of mixed desserts for $14!

Hey everyone! How have you all been? I am sure you are all wondering why I never started my New York blog series. I know it has been almost 3 weeks since I made the announcement and I have yet to post the first installment. Well, long story short, it is a major pain in the ass to move to New York City. Ignorantly, I had these ideas about 19 year olds from the Midwest that just up and move to New York and automatically find a one room studio for $800 a month and just work day and night to move up to a one bedroom whenever they’ve saved enough money.

Let me just say, if you are thinking about this little fantasy too, THAT IS NOT HOW IT WORKS.

Reality smacked me in the face quite quickly. About a month ago, I went up to Massachusetts with my boyfriend. He has a timeshare up there and we figured we could just take the train into the city everyday and find something quickly. I had been looking on Zillow.com and Trulia.com for a few weeks, but everyone that I called or emailed said to call them when I got to the city because the listings that were available would be gone by the time I got there. I later found out that the average listing is only available for 48 hours, so you have to jump on them immediately and submit an application.

I found one realtor online that worked in Brooklyn (from what I understand the real estate licenses in the city are only good for one borough, so most agents stick to one borough). She called me about a week before I was due to arrive and I gave her my budget and the areas I wanted to live. At this time, I had this fantasy in my mind that I would be able to find a studio for $900, so I said that my budget was $1000 a month. I did not have any other requirements. As I am not moving my furniture, I did not care about square footage or anything. This agent told me to contact her when I got to New York, so on the ride up to Massachusetts I called her and we talked for about 45 minutes. She said she would look and call me back the next morning.

I found out through research that if you are not employed in New York City, you have to have a cosigner from the tri-state area. If you call people and tell them you are a student and you have cash for the lease (which I did), they still won’t show you the listing because most places require you to have a minimum income of 40 times the rent. i.e. A studio for $1000 a month means you have to make $40,000 at a job in New York.

Hey! How has everyone been? As you’ve noticed I’ve been MIA since I got back from Italy. I told you guys a few times during my trip that I had a big announcement that would kick off my next blog series, so here it is:

I WAS ACCEPTED TO THE M.A. IN WORLD HISTORY PROGRAM AT NYU AND I WILL BE MOVING TO NYC AT THE END OF AUGUST!

I will kick off the new blog series this weekend! I am renting a car and driving up there to apartment hunt this weekend and next week, before coming back to Texas for one more week.

The road trip should provide some good material to write about and I am going to try to do some Geocaching and I am going to an Oriole’s game on Sunday!

Stay tuned for an awesome 18 to 24 moth blog series which will follow my move to New York and all of the challenges that come along with graduate school and moving out on my own for the first time!

I woke up around 8:30 and got ready. I made sure everything was packed, stripped my bed, put all my dirty linens and stuff in the sink, and rearranged my room back to the way it was when I arrived.

I’m a weirdo and like to leave hotel rooms cleaner than when I found them, so, yeah.

I went to the restroom and then checked out and headed to the vaporetto stop. My pass that I bought on Friday during the strike still worked, somehow, so I used it and went to the train station. I bought my ticket to Naples and the train was already there, so I jumped on-board and headed for Rome. The first-class section of the high-speed trains are awesome: free newspaper, free snacks, free WiFi, luggage storage and crazy large seats! Definitely worth the price, in my opinion…one of the only things I’ve been willing to splurge on during this journey. Also, yes, I validated my tickets and didn’t get any on the spot fines.

Once I got to Rome I found the platform for my next train and then went to get a sandwich and some water. I got on my next train and there was no WiFi, so I ate my lunch, took some footage on my GoPro, listened to some music and took a nap.

My friend was waiting on me right when I got to Aversa, so we went straight to her house and I unpacked my stuff and freshened up. About that time, her husband got home from work and we decided to go downtown and have pizza.

We drove to Naples and saw an apartment building that was completely on fire…everyone just stopped in the highway to watch. We went to L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele aka Eat, Pray, Love pizzeria! It was SO cool! I LOVE going to places from movies and TV shows and that movie is one of my all time favorites, so it was absolutely amazingly amazing. They only serve one kind of pizza and you get an entire one to yourself, so we all had drinks and pizza and then drove around downtown. I got some good GoPro footage of the traffic and crazy drivers, which I will hopefully get to upload soon!

Naples is something else man. All the windows of the stores are smashed or painted on, the traffic has absolutely no rhyme or reason, its crazy polluted and dirty…but it’s charming in a weird way. I was planning on taking the bus from my friend’s house to downtown on Thursday to go explore alone, but I don’t really know if I’m going to do that now…it was a little scary.

After dinner, we drove back to where they live near Aversa and got gelato. On the way to the gelato place I saw a woman standing by a bucket on the phone…it was a prostitute. I thought it was her seat just to wait for Johns, but my friend said it’s her BATHROOM and that she’s seen her pop-a-squat on it before!

Apparently crime syndicates own the women (usually from Africa, Asia, or Eastern Europe-not Italian women) so the police don’t arrest them or mess with them at all…I couldn’t believe it!

Tomorrow we are going back downtown and then to a wine tasting tomorrow night! Talk you guys tomorrow!